Empire Day Read online

  I had no idea where this was going.

  Every nerve in my body was saying: ‘get up and run away; run through the nearest wall if you have to!’

  “Me, dangerous? Seriously?”

  “Ideas are much more dangerous than bullets, Professor.”

  I would have disagreed, except I did not. Disagree, that was.

  Lieutenant Adams viewed me like a Lioness sizing up her next meal.

  “Tell me about George Washington?”

  Oh shit!

  I told every class the ‘George Washington’ story.

  I wanted to get my students thinking, really thinking about what history was, how it worked and why it mattered. If kids wanted to learn a list of names and dates by rote that was fine by me but that was not actually learning anything at all. History was a thing that flowed through one’s veins, that branched and died back, twisted and turned and was therefore, rarely predictable. The past tells you very little about the future but it tells you a lot about people.

  “I don’t use the George Washington story in the manner of a political polemic,” I protested. “I use it as a thought experiment to encourage young minds to grow, to develop, to form their own opinions. To get young people interested in our history.”

  To my surprise, and consternation, the young woman smiled.

  “So, imagine I am one of your students, Professor. Assume that I want to know if history is the autobiography of a madman or something that I, as a mere woman, can understand and that might, in some way I do not as yet comprehend, be of more than passing relevance to my normal life.”

  I fell for it.

  I was suckered in hook, line and sinker.

  No fool like an old fool!

  “If you live in some parts of New Spain history must seem like pages straight out of the autobiography of a madman,” I observed. I thought I was being quite pithy but I got the same ‘new student’ look I always got.

  In for a penny, in for a pound.

  I was already guilty of something; albeit I had no idea what so with a sigh I started talking.

  “I take what I do, teaching, very seriously. Our kids need to be taught well. When we send them out into the world they need to be ready for what’s out there; that’s what education is for. So, I have my own credo, as it were. And that’s what I try to communicate with my students.”

  Neither of his executioners told me to shut up.

  “I believe,” I said, ‘that now and then historians should stand back from what actually happened and why, and ask themselves what might have happened? It does not matter if one is a determinist or a fatalist; a believer in the great man (or woman) theory of things, or a conspiracy theorist, or simply a believer in ‘what will be will be’. Frankly, there are points in the past where the world might easily have taken a different course. And no, I am not talking about chaos theory, whereby a butterfly flaps its wings and the world, in some non-specific, indefinable way is never the same again. Randomness and chance, the roll of the dice of death, birth, redemption, atonement or calumny are incalculable variables; that is a given. That is just life; c’est la vie. No, what I am alluding to is the possibility that there might be moments – perhaps, identifiable moments – when something happened that was of such moment that history thereafter took a radically different path from than that which it might otherwise have taken. That literally, in that moment the fate of great nations, of empires was changed by a single, decisive event.”

  “Hence the George Washington story?” Lieutenant Adams asked rhetorically.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “It is in all the standard histories of the First Rebellion but modern historians tend to underplay Washington’s significance.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “No.”

  “I’m no student of mid-New England history,” the woman admitted. “Tell me George Washington’s story.”

  I was genuinely at a loss.

  I thought I was being interrogated.

  And still not sure why except it probably had something to do with Abe.

  “What’s happened to Abe?” I asked, doggedly.

  Lieutenant Adams crossed her arms across her breasts, which were small, pert and generally proportioned in a most complimentary fashion to the rest of her personage. This I noticed because despite my advanced years – fifty-seven and counting, although the way things were going, not for much longer – I still notice these things. As Sarah would say, and Rachel, bless her, was also wont: ‘Men!’

  Okay, the woman was not going to answer my question.

  She really wanted me to tell her the story of the Battle of Long Island!

  ‘Can I stand up?’

  This got blank looks.

  “I always do this story standing up, it adds to the,” I shrugged, ‘atmosphere. It’s not the same if I can’t wave my arms around.”

  Lieutenant Adams waved for me to go ahead.

  For a moment there was a look in her eyes that might have been a reaction to my surreptitious voyeuristically veiled – I hoped – scrutiny of her bust; but probably had more to do with which part of my anatomy she planned to order the torturers to break first.

  ‘You have to imagine we’re standing on Brooklyn Heights,” I explained.

  Detective Inspector Danson murmured: “that’s about twenty miles to the west of here overlooking the East River and the bridge between Long Island and New York.”

  The woman frowned as she tried to sort out her geography.

  “Is that north or south of the Admiralty Ship Yards at Wallabout Bay?”

  “South.”

  “Oh, there,” she sighed.

  “The date is late on the evening of Tuesday 27th August 1776 and in the course of the day some nine thousand men of the citizen Continental Army – to all intents the only rebel army - have been driven back onto the Heights, which in those days were more high ground in open country rather than mountains of any description, by a British force of over twenty thousand professional soldiers including around eight thousand Hessian mercenaries under the command of Major General William Howe. The American, sorry, the rebels on the other hand are mostly civilian-soldiers. Among them are a number of sharp-shooters but man for man they are no match for the British.”

  I could tell Lieutenant Adams was impatient.

  Danson, on the other hand, was a man who like a good story.

  But the lady was a woman in a hurry.

  “The British already hold Staten Island and they have a fleet anchored in the Upper Bay well out of range of the guns guarding the Hudson and the East Rivers. The rebels had assumed the British intended to force the Hudson and drive north, splitting the so-called ‘United Colonies’ in half. George Washington, among others, had been so fixated fortifying and defending the Hudson that he had regarded the British build up on Long Island as some kind of feint. It was a classic case of two sides completely misunderstanding what the other regarded as the main objective of the campaign. William Howe did not want to conquer a hostile wilderness and spend the next couple of years mopping up the surviving continentals; he wanted to bring to action and to destroy the whole rebel army in a single battle. And by dusk on the evening of 27th August 1776, that was pretty much what he had achieved.”

  “Washington?” Lieutenant Adams reminded me.

  “By that evening the continentals have already suffered over a thousand casualties and as many as half the regiments engaged that day had simply broken and skedaddled to the rear when the British charged their positions. The man who had been in charge at the outset was a fellow called Israel Putnam; although our friend George Washington had crossed the East River during the battle to see what was going on and ordered several more regiments to follow him before he realised how truly hopeless things were.”

  “Washington actually made things worse then?” Danson put to me.

  “That’s one way of looking at it. Anyways, the Continentals have been driven into defensive works with a more or less open flank in the sout
h with their back to the East River and the Upper Bay. On paper there are as many as two or three thousand other rebels on Manhattan Island, but only a small proportion of them are front line troops, many are ill, not fit for service, untrained or required to man Fort George at the southernmost tip of Manhattan. And,” I said, trying to be melodramatic as I began to pace – two steps this way and two back, time and again, “as dusk falls the British fleet, which has been awaiting its moment on the western side of the Upper Bay is preparing to set sail. On Manhattan Island they don’t know if this is the long-expected attempt to ‘force the Hudson’ or to blockade the East River and trap the Continental Army on Long Island. To sum up the situation: one, the Continentals have lost the battle on land and are trapped; two, if the British fleet fights its way past the batteries guarding Manhattan and the western shore of Long Island ten thousand men – minus the thousand or so who have already been killed or wounded – will be captured; three, most of the Continental Army’s senior men are on the wrong, Long Island side of the East River; four, if something is not done now everything is lost. But, one man has a plan!”

  “This man George Washington, presumably?” Lieutenant Adams prompted, wearily.

  I was not communicating with these people!

  “Okay, I’m George Washington,” I informed the two cops. “I’m going to tell you the way it is.”

  Nobody shot me so I took that as a green light.

  “My name is George Washington,” I continued. This was ridiculous but I had no idea what these people wanted from me except, most likely, my hide; so, what did I have to lose? “Like I said, it’s Tuesday night and the last few days have been the most sanguinary of my whole life. I’m not a career soldier like Howe, Clinton, Cornwallis and the other generals on the English side. I’m a forty-three-year old Virginia planter who got railroaded into being appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army – which didn’t exist at the time – the year before.”

  I had got to quite like old George over the years.

  “My forebears were landed English gentry, my great-grandfather emigrated to Virginia in 1656 but my own wealth mainly derives from my marriage – a very happy marriage, I might add - to the widow Martha Dandridge Custis. I’m a tall fellow, some say handsome; despite my physiognomy being somewhat pocked by a brush with smallpox in Barbados in 1851. Physically, I tower over the majority of my peers. However, as to my military credentials, those are tenuous. My peers assume that I have been given my command on the basis of my Virginian ‘connections’, my ‘commanding presence’, and not a lot else and broadly speaking they would be correct. Back in the days when I was one of six ne'er-do-well surviving siblings of a merchant gentleman beset with financial embarrassments I had trained as a surveyor. That was back in the late 1740s and early 1750s. Frankly, although tiresome, the outbreak of the French and Indian Wars rescued me from my chosen profession in 1753. Unfortunately, not in a good way. My reputation was somewhat sullied in the action at Fort Necessity, and only redeemed when I accompanied General Edward Braddock on his ill-starred Monongahela Expedition. I would go so far as to say that my experience of that war taught me much of what I know now about how not to conduct military operations!”

  I was getting into character now.

  “Others had recognised in me characteristics and qualities of leadership that, frankly, I had not seen in my own person until I was offered command of the Virginia Regiment, a commission I held with pride between 1755 and 1758 charged with protecting the outlying districts of my colony against French marauders and their native confederates. I lost some three hundred of my one thousand men in the course of a score of trying engagements and skirmishes. To my chagrin I came to recognise that my superiors did not have a care for their men during the campaigns of those years. My Virginians were attacked by friendly formations during the Fort Duquesne expedition, suffering some forty or more casualties on account of the negligence of senior officers. Subsequently, I confess, that it was with no little relief that I hung up my sword in 1758 and returned to civilian life; never, I confess ever thinking to take up the profession of arms again!”

  I shrugged, held my hands wide.

  “But it was not to be. Congress called upon me to lead the Continental Army. I asked for twenty-eight thousand men; I was given nineteen thousand. We bested our enemies at Boston but I knew that the issue would be determined here in New York. Hence, I brought my raggle-taggle army south. My plan was to stalemate the English long enough for the winter to freeze the battle lines.”

  Detective Inspector Danson guffawed softly.

  “And then what were you going to do, George?”

  “I planned to lead my foes a merry chase. My men had no chance in open battle but our land is great and every man the British lost through sickness or in battle would take six months to a year to be replaced from Europe. I planned to let the predations of campaigning, sickness and war-weariness take its toll on my enemies. I’m not sure if that amounts to ‘a plan’ but on that last Tuesday evening in August 1776 it all seemed somewhat academic. As darkness fell it was likely that but for a miracle our rebellion was doomed less than two months after our Declaration of Independence had been promulgated at the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia. If our army was lost and New York fell our enemy would surely hollow out the rebellion from within; without the Continental Army the British might strike north up the Hudson Valley or south towards Trenton and Philadelphia. It would only be a matter of time before the colonies were split in half, subdued in detail, or seized by the loyalist rump who sought to undermine their fellows at every turn…”

  “Loyalists?” Lieutenant Adams objected, speaking for the first time in several minutes.

  “Loyalists to the crown. The war had set brother upon brother and friend against friend up and down the East Coast. I can tell you that dire thoughts rifled my mind that afternoon as I gazed out across the forest of masts of the hundreds of merchantmen, great ships of the line and the low, lean frigates of the Royal Navy waiting ready to unfurl their sails and force an entry to the Hudson and the East Rivers. I felt helpless, knowing full well that if the wind shifted, even a few points to the south of east or west, there was nothing in the World that would stop Vice Admiral Richard ‘Black Dick’ Howe’s men-of-war trapping my ten thousand men on Long Island. With the Royal Navy at my back and General William Howe’s – the British liked to keep these things in the family in those days, William was the younger brother of the admiral - twenty thousand mercenaries and professional Redcoats at his front, I would be trapped. Moreover, if the day’s fighting had taught me anything it was that I relied on my own generals at my peril.”

  The woman vented a long, irritated sigh.

  For the first time Danson gave his fellow cop a look that was very nearly but not quite, schoolmasterish. She shrugged, waved for me to continue.

  “There comes a point in every campaign, rebellion, battle or whatever,” I explained, “when everything is up for grabs and Washington was general enough to know that time was coming, if that was, it was not already upon him.”

  I slipped out of character.

  “You see by then the war with the old country had been rumbling on for the best part of two years, Washington had driven the British garrison and the Royal Navy out of Boston that spring; but that was then and this was now, and the British had finally got their act together big time. The Howe brothers had succeeded in bringing over-whelming fighting power on land and at sea to bear on the so-called Continental Army of the fledgling, and barely united colonies of the East Coast. The Continentals were exhausted and Washington’s guns were running short of powder. Out in the Upper Bay the guns of Fort Defiance on Red Hook, Governor’s Island and at Fort George might hold off the English for a while but there were too many ships already in the Upper Bay and the moment Washington pulled men back from his defence works General Cornwallis’s Hessian mercenaries – thousands of them - would pour through the gaps. Washington knew he had lost
the battle and that whatever happened the British would be in Manhattan in days. So, he did what any good general would do. He took a deep breath and threw the dice one last time.”

  I resumed my seat at the table.

  “Washington gambled, or at least we think he gambled; what seems to have happened was that he sent an order across the East River to Manhattan ordering every boat – effectively the local fishing fleet - to cross to the Brooklyn shore that night. He meant to mount a diversion and save as many of his men as he could before the enemy realised what was going on. It was his only hope. If he could keep his army ‘in being’ the rebellion might still have legs. It was a desperate move but not ill-considered. The previous night there had been a fog on the East River and the British clearly disliked fighting at night as much as his men; so, he might have got lucky. If all went well the evacuation would begin at four o’clock on the next morning, Wednesday 28th August. It can’t have been much fun waiting for the first boats to arrive. Periodically, English guns lobbed balls into the redoubts along Brooklyn Heights – Fort Putnam, Fort Box and Fort Greene – as Washington strode through the darkness, seeking out his generals.”